Fixing Immigration: An Interview with Rinku Sen

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Rinku Sen is the author, with Fekkak Mamdouh, of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization.

Q. You write about three common misconceptions that distort our national debate about immigration. What are they?

A. The first is the belief that people migrate to the United States because of their individual choices. We fail to take into account the fact that we have in this world an uneven economic globalization. Corporations are able to move around at will; in fact they are rewarded for crossing borders and looking for the most favorable conditions for their businesses. When human beings try to do the same thing, they’re held up by men with guns standing at the border or by visa bureaucracies and immigration laws. There’s a fundamental unfairness to that that we have to be able to address, both in our global economic policy and in our domestic immigration policy.

The second blind spot is that we behave as though cultures never change. There’s a thread of the immigration debate on the restrictionist side that insists we need to limit immigration in order to preserve American culture—as if that hasn’t changed since the country was founded in 1776. All cultures change all the time: They change from within and they change from external forces. To make immigration policy as a way to preserve a pure and natural American culture is fiction at best and actually racist at worst.

The third is that we believe U.S. residents and immigrants have opposing interests. In fact, we all have the same set of interests. Most people want a decent education for their kids, good housing, and a dignified job. These are the things we could be fighting for together, and we would do much better joined together than we would apart.

Q. How do we get to a place where these myths have less of a hold over people? And how hopeful are you we can get there?

A. I actually hold out a lot of hope. In recent polls we see that 60–70 percent of Americans believe that undocumented people should be legalized, and that immigration reform should be high on the federal agenda right now. People understand that to have millions of people living essentially underground, in the shadows, is not good for the cohesiveness of U.S. communities. If thousands of people in a particular city are not sending their kids to school and afraid to even go out to the grocery store, that does something to the national fabric that is not positive.

People also recognize that undocumented people are making many economic contributions and to block this would be shooting ourselves in the foot. The loss of jobs and the fiscal and budget crises that our states and cities are facing are caused not by undocumented people but by economical decisions we have made. If we want a stable economy with growth, we need to be able to fight inequity—where everybody is working hard, but some are earning a lot and others are barely making a living—particularly racial and gender inequity. Immigration reform is a major part of tackling that.

Read the rest of PBC's interview here

Watch this video of Rinku Sen as she debunks other misconceptions about immigration.

Learn more about The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization at Progressive Book Club, where you'll find reviews, interviews, discussions, articles, and more.